The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘At least they all died together,’ Madame d’Enville said.

  ‘Well, Maman, it cannot be long now before our turn comes. Sister Gregory says there were five hundred and nine people executed during Prairial. I don’t know how she knows the figures so exactly.’

  ‘I am sure Condorcet devised some system for recording the numbers. Prairial indeed. No, it cannot be long now, my dear.’

  Even the short summer nights were unendurable. Rosalie looked out at the deep blue night and thought of Condorcet lying low all winter only a few streets away. How strange to think of them both confined to a single room all that time, with nothing to do but recollect a past that was irreparably lost. And then him breaking out and stumbling down the street into the country, his gangling legs hobbling over the stony plain, utterly alone with only his mathematical visions to console him under the stars.

  She dreamed of Wm too, but not of their fucking or even of their first passionate declarations of love. Sorrow had chastened her. All thought of desire or its fulfilment had been bleached from her mind. Only the quieter recollections came to her now – of Wm standing at the edge of the lake at Versailles, that slight fair figure, so neat beside the lanky figures of her husband and Mr Jefferson; William sitting beside her grandmother in the little salon reading Voltaire’s Zadig in his pure French and pausing now and then to smile across at her; William in his canary vest tossing the hay into the stooks and singing some old Negro song that she did not understand.

  In the long silences of the night and in the afternoon when her grandmother had gone to sleep, Rosalie sometimes fancied that the world had stopped, as though the burden of sorrow it was carrying was so great that it had simply ceased to spin.

  Then, when she heard steps coming along the passage, she would sit up with a shudder. Sooner or later, probably sooner, those steps would be coming to tell her to get ready. It would be a consolation then to have her grandmother to look after. That might help her to make a brave end, though what use was a brave end? Her brother and her husband had been torn apart by savages without a moment’s warning. Why should she wish for anything better? She thought that she ought to have a farewell letter to William prepared, but then she did not wish to leave anything for their executioners to spit on. Wm would know what she felt. She had told him often enough.

  Sometimes she was angry and raged at the world’s unkindness. At other times she felt weirdly removed, as though she were in a mesmeric trance, looking down at these terrible events from a great distance and wondering that God could allow them to happen, wondering if they had happened at all. At any moment Charles might come in from the terrace, stepping through the long windows, fanning himself with his peasant’s straw hat and shouting, ‘How do you keep so cool, Ro-Ro? I swear you must be sitting on a block of ice.’ Or her husband would look up from his papers and smile over his spectacles: ‘Ah, there you are, my dear, is Maman down yet?’ And then she would lurch back into reality and the hard outline of despair that no daydream could dispel.

  She was tired to the point of extinction. At first she could not understand this. What, after all, did she have to do all day except sit and knit and talk to her grandmother? Maman explained that it is only hope that refreshes us and gives us energy to continue life. Without hope they must reconcile themselves to a life in the shadows. ‘We are ghosts, my darling, you and I, part of the living dead. There are whole regiments of us in France now. Perhaps there always were. We just never noticed when we ourselves were full of the joy of living. Now we can feel their presence everywhere.’

  It was hot again. Even their cells, so cool from November to May, had become unbearable. Sister Gregory tried to open the windows with her long pole, but they had sealed them tight at the outbreak of the Revolution (after all, the Bastille was only three hundred yards away) and now the catches had rusted.

  ‘Pouf, I am stifling.’ Madame d’Enville sighed. ‘Perhaps the heat will finish me off before the list reaches us.’

  There was a clatter of steps outside, too loud and fast for one of the sisters. This must be the time. Rosalie’s heart beat as fast as a trapped bird’s.

  But it was after all Sister Gregory who burst in, her red face dripping with sweat and her blue eyes shining with a watery gleam. ‘Bloody heck, ma’am, pardon my language, but they’ve done him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The little fellow, Robespierre. Chopped him this morning, though they say he were already half dead from having tried to top himself last night. All covered with blood he were before they put him on the plank.’

  ‘There may be worse to come, all the same. Men who are capable of killing such a man must be even more desperate than he.’

  ‘No, ma’am, there ain’t no worse. Take my word for it, this be the end of it.’

  Rosalie and her grandmother stared at Sister Gregory’s gleaming face, her great red hands clasping and unclasping in her delight. And somehow they believed her.

  It took several months from that day in Thermidor, to the beginning of Brumaire in their case, before the authorities felt confident enough to release the more harmless prisoners. Even then Rosalie and her grandmother were ordered to stay at La Roche and not to wander about the country, which they had not the least wish to do. They were thankful to see the Seine again and the chateau rising out of the mist and half the village standing at the gate to welcome them – and in turn to receive their thanks for the petition the commune had sent to Paris which had hastened their release.

  The second day after they had come home she wrote to Wm who was still bowed down by business in Aranjuez:

  My dear and tender friend, the length of our separation distresses me beyond words, I see no end to it. Misfortune seems to weigh down my sad days. After having lost almost all my family, most of them by the assassin’s blade, having endured ten and a half months of captivity and seen my companions in misfortune taken from me and a hundred times expected the same fate myself, my courage was sustained by the feelings that united us, by the certainty of your love, by the hope that heaven would bring together two hearts to love one another. The memory of you was my only strength, the picture of you and the hope of seeing you again my only consolations.

  When I was set free, I experienced the joy which is natural on the return of something so necessary to existence, but after those first moments of pleasure in seeing the people and places I thought I would never see again, I felt once more the emptiness that your absence causes me. I write you this letter out of my need to think about you and talk to you, though I have no idea if it will ever reach you. Dreams are my only comfort now that reality has nothing more to offer me.

  I kept all your letters – they were my most precious possession – but they were then burnt, not by me, at a moment when this seemed necessary. I only discovered this some time afterwards and I was deeply pained to discover it. I have now only the last one that I received in prison and two others that reached me before I was arrested. I have carefully preserved some books you gave me – the works of Pope in very small print and Lyttleton’s History of England. For the past two years I have never failed to wear the little gold ring in links (the one you had our two initials engraved on). It is very dear to me, for it always recalls our love and the happier days when you gave it to me. I have also the lock of your hair, which I cut off when I gave you mine just before you left for Holland.

  Take care of yourself [here for the first time in all the years they have been writing to one another, she tutoyers him], keep your heart safe for me, it is my only treasure, you gave it to me and you will never regret it. My darling, I am not unhappy, since you love me and since neither time nor distance can destroy these feelings.

  All the places in the countryside here where you showed those feelings to me are dearer than anywhere else in the world. I seek them out and they mean more to me than I can tell you. That meadow where I received the first overtures of your heart, the hillside where you renewed them the next day, the embarrassment and
perplexity they caused me, although I now think that those reactions were already the beginnings of love, to judge by the pleasure I now take in recalling them.

  And do you think that I have forgotten that day when we were sitting together by the pond in the garden in Paris and you suddenly got up to go and carve our initials on the bark of a tree without telling me what you were doing and you begged me not to come nearer until you had finished? And when I was allowed to look at your work, the only way I could express what I felt was to press my lips on the initials and you did the same.

  For almost two years the heartless fate which is opposed to our happiness has kept us apart. Neither fear nor even the threat of impending death ever made me forget you. On the contrary, the shadow of death inspired me with a desire to die worthy of you. In the end heaven has ordered things differently, but in snatching me from death, has it done so only to leave me to drag out a miserable existence far from everything I love? No, I prefer to believe that life was not restored to me in vain. This is the second time I have escaped death when I thought it inevitable. It is the will of providence that I shall find my beloved again and that his tenderness will comfort me in my sorrows. At any rate I cannot stop hoping for this and surrendering myself to such sweet delusions, which will perhaps not be delusions for ever.

  She had never before written him so long a letter, nor one that moved him so much. And it came to him at the worst time in his life, at least that was how he thought of it. Before he read more than the first page, he had to sit down in the wicker chair in his glassed-in loggia to recover his calm. And when he had finished reading and looked out at the dry bony mountains beyond the plains of Castile, he found that his eyes were watering.

  Only two days earlier the worst of the rumours had been confirmed. He was not to return to Paris and nor (vainest of vain hopes) was Mr Jefferson. James Monroe, his fellow alumnus from Virginia, was to replace Gouverneur. That he already had wind of, and that was bad enough. But he was not even to stay in Madrid. The Queen’s favourite, that sly army officer, Manuel Godoy, had complained to General Washington of him. Senor Short lacked the stature, the circumspection to negotiate with the Spanish court on so ticklish a matter as navigation rights on the Mississippi and the southern boundary of the United States. A plenipotentiary of greater weight was required. Wm had already had it out with the slimy Godoy, who of course denied that he had made any such complaint. But the damage was done and Mr Pinckney in London was already packing his bags for Madrid.

  Wm fired off letters to all and sundry, even to TJ with whom he had become virtually incommunicado. Washington’s treatment of him would embitter and perplex him for the rest of his life, he said; he would of course resign from the public service since his own services were so little appreciated. It was small comfort to him that he had been proved right in everything he touched. He had forecast the terrible course that events would take in France, he had faced down the Dutch bankers and secured the finances of the US for years to come, and as for the Spanish-American treaty that Mr Pinckney was to have the glory of signing, that would be pretty much on the terms that he had already mapped out. But none of this counted in the eyes of muddleheaded presidents and secretaries of state and a braying Congress. To them William Short was dispensable, little better than a dead man walking.

  When he had finished writing, he saddled his diminutive Spanish mare (more like a mule than a horse) and rode out into the stony pampas behind his lodging. There was a biting wind off the mountains and it was bitter cold despite the clear sky. The wind kept his eyes watering but his self-pity was changing into defiance. Crawling for office was no way for a man to live. Godoy was a miserable creature, more to be pitied than envied. You could detect his shifts and shuffles a mile off. Wm would do his duty and guide Pinckney in the right direction. Then he would be off, to live the life of a free man, which was above all to love and be loved.

  They would marry, perhaps not immediately. There was still Madame d’Enville to be thought of. But they would marry and sail to America and make a home in Virginia. They would build their own Philadelphia where there would be no slaves but only free men employed. Who knew, perhaps his example might persuade Mr Jefferson to free his slaves at Monticello and so the movement for liberation would spread throughout Virginia until even the dullest Tidewater squire followed the fashion. As he trotted through the bushes at the edge of the plain, he caught the faint winter scent of thyme and sage and began to dream of Rosalie weeding in their potager beside the banks of the James river and of the little pavilion on the hill above the swamp oaks which he would design himself and where they would take coffee – it would be on the lines of Madame du Barry’s tea house at Louveciennes but smaller (even in his daydreams he could not shake off his American suspicion of grandeur). And perhaps if his neighbours approached him, he might consent to run for the Senate in the room of Mr Lee, or perhaps for Governor – how Rosalie would grace the Governor’s mansion with her irresistible French accent and her elegant French style. Or if not, then so be it. He was content to let his achievements speak for him, while he felt the wind on his cheek and thought of her just as he knew she had never ceased to think of him.

  *

  So when Pinckney arrived at Madrid (taking his time about it), Wm was able to greet him without any show of rancour and stand at his elbow, just as President Washington had asked him.

  ‘You’re not sorry, then?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘To be leaving the foreign service.’

  ‘I was never happier in my life.’

  Pinckney was startled by Wm’s vehemence, but he was telling the truth, for this was surely a godsent opportunity to carry out the greatest mission of all, which was to live for love, sincerely and without simulation or artifice just as Rousseau had prescribed, to live as no other generation of humanity had lived, finding the truest satisfaction in the eyes of the Other. For the troubadours of old Provence love had been only a game, for the Christians (and William was pretty sure he was not a Christian) it had been a confused emotion to be poured out upon a Being who was at best indifferent and probably did not exist at all, in short to waste your energies upon a delusion. But to love Rosalie as he did, that was the least delusive vocation in the world, it was the passport to the ultimate reality, for everything he loved in her was real, not just her mischief-brimming black eyes, her white apple-breasts and her soft thighs grinding against him, but also her deep unshakeable affections, the sharpness of her wit, her quick apprehension of danger, her surprising perseverance, her tenacious hold on life, even when or perhaps precisely when she said that her sorrows had ended all possibility of hope. And her faults, these were real too and he loved them just as much, not only because she owned up to them so sweetly but because they made him so aware of the blood coursing in her veins: her quick temper like her brother Charles’s, her flashes of childish snobbery, her refusal to forgive.

  My God! How delighted I was to hear news of you from Paris this morning. I could not believe that you could be so close to us. Come and see us as soon as you can. Maman will be overjoyed to see you. What pleasure I shall have, how many things I shall have to tell you that have piled up since you left us. Three years gone, and what years! It could be as many centuries.

  Three years they had been apart and in the two years before that, when their affair had burst into flame, they had snatched only a week here and there together and always in conditions that demanded concealment, and were flushed with embarrassment and guilt. Even that final fortnight at Christmas three years earlier when they were first free to sleep together she had been in mourning – he remembered the slither of the crêpe as he unhooked her skirt.

  ‘You will find Maman sadly downed,’ she said to him after they had kissed out of sight of the coachman unloading the bags.

  He dreaded to find those bright old eyes dim and unseeing. Perhaps she would not even recognise him. But Madame d’Enville held out her arms as though welcoming a child that had only ju
st learnt to walk. ‘Ah, Monsieur Short, it is an eternity since we have seen you.’

  It was only later on, when they had drawn the heavy brocade curtains, so frayed and dusty now, that she began to wander a little. ‘Is Monsieur Jefferson coming? Have you brought him with you?’

  ‘Maman, Monsieur Jefferson is in America.’

  ‘So he is, I forget. I have written to him, you know, to tell him that you must be the next minister.’

  ‘That is very kind of you, madame.’

  ‘But I do not think he has answered yet. Rosalie, have we had a reply from Monsieur Jefferson?’

  ‘Not yet, Maman.’

  ‘My son must write to him too. Monsieur Jefferson thinks very highly of him, does he not, Monsieur Short?’

  ‘I cannot think of anyone in France he esteems more highly.’

  And so this evening passed by the fire, as other evenings were to pass, in the exchange of soft half-truths and consoling glances. Madame d’Enville liked to take both their hands and hold them in a surprisingly firm grip, as though she were a priest joining them in marriage.

  In the mornings her mind’s grip too would be surprisingly firm. ‘I talked a great deal of nonsense last night, I fear. Rosalie, you must tell me when I am talking nonsense or I shall become insufferable.’

  ‘On the contrary, madame, you are becoming more lovable by the day.’